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NON-COMBATANTS AND OTHERS
BY ROSE MACAULAY
AUTHOR OF 'THE LEE SHORE,' 'THE MAKING OF A BIGOT,' ETC.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
_Printed in 1916_
TO
MY BROTHER
AND OTHER COMBATANTS
'Let the foul scene proceed:
There's laughter in the wings:
'Tis sawdust that they bleed,
But a box Death brings.
Gigantic dins uprise!
Even the gods must feel
A smarting of the eyes
As these fumes upsweal.
Strange, such a Piece is free,
While we Spectators sit
Aghast at its agony,
Yet absorbed in it.
Dark is the outer air,
Cold the night draughts blow,
Mutely we stare, and stare
At the frenzied show.
Yet heaven has its quiet shroud
Of deep and starry blue--
We cry "An end!" we are bowed
By the dread "'Tis true!"
While the Shape who hoofs applause
Behind our deafened ear
Hoots--angel-wise--"the Cause!"
And affrights even fear.'
WALTER DE LA MARE, _The Marionettes_.
'War is just the killing of things and the smashing of things.
And when it is all over, then literature and civilisation will
have to begin all over again. They will have to begin lower
down and against a heavier load.... The Wild Asses of the Devil
are loose, and there is no restraining them. What is the good,
Wilkins, of pretending that the Wild Asses are the instruments
of Providence, kicking better than we know? It is all evil.'
REGINALD BLISS, _Boon_.
'There is work for all who find themselves outside the battle.'
ROMAIN ROLLAND, _Above the Battle_.
CONTENTS
PART I. WOOD END
CHAPTER I. JOHN COMES HOME
CHAPTER II. JOHN TALKS
CHAPTER III. ALIX GOES
PART II. VIOLETTE
CHAPTER IV. SATURDAY MORNING AT VIOLETTE
CHAPTER V. AFTERNOON OUT
CHAPTER VI. EVENING AT VIOLETTE
CHAPTER VII. HOSPITAL
CHAPTER VIII. BASIL AT VIOLETTE
CHAPTER IX. SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY
CHAPTER X. EVENING IN CHURCH
CHAPTER XI. ALIX AND EVIE
CHAPTER XII. ALIX AND BASIL
CHAPTER XIII. ALIX, NICHOLAS, AND WEST
PART III. DAPHNE
CHAPTER XIV. DAPHNE AT VIOLETTE
CHAPTER XV. ALIX AT A MEETING
CHAPTER XVI. ON PEACE
CHAPTER XVII. NEW YEAR'S EVE
PART I
WOOD END
CHAPTER I
JOHN COMES HOME
1
In a green late April evening, among the dusky pine shadows, Alix drew
Percival Briggs. Percival stood with his small cleft chin lifted
truculently, small blue eyes deep under fair, frowning brows, one
scratched brown leg bare to the knee, dirty hands thrust into torn
pockets. He was the worst little boy in the wood, and had been till six
months ago the worst little boy in the Sunday-school class of Alix's
cousin Dorothy. He had not been converted six months ago, but Dorothy,
like so many, had renounced Sunday-school to work in a V.A.D. hospital.
Alix, who was drawing Percival, worked neither in a Sunday-school nor in
a hospital. She only drew. She drew till the green light became green
gloom, lit by a golden star that peered down between the pines. She had
a pale, narrow, delicate, irregular sort of face, broad-browed, with a
queer, cynical, ironic touch to it, and purple-blue eyes that sometimes
opened very wide and sometimes narrowed into slits. When they narrowed
she looked as from behind a visor, critical, defensive, or amused; when
they opened wide she looked singularly unguarded, as if the bars were up
and she, unprotected, might receive the enemy's point straight and
clean. Behind her, on the wood path, was a small donkey between the
shafts of a small cart. A rough yellow dog scratched and sniffed and
explored among the roots of the trees.
Alix said to Percival, 'That will do, thank you. Here you are,' and
fished out sixpence in coppers from her pocket, and he clutched and
gripped them in a small retentive fist.
Alix, who was rather lame, put her stool and easel and charcoal into the
cart, got in herself, beat the donkey, and ambled on along the path,
followed by the yellow dog.
The evening was dim and green, and smelt of pines. The donkey trotted
past cottage gardens, and they were sweet with wallflowers. More stars
came out and peered down through the tree-tops. Alix whistled softly, a
queer little Polish tune, indeterminate, sad and gay.
2
Two miles up the path a side-track led off from it, and this the
donkey-cart took, till it fetched up in a little yard. Alix climbed out,
unharnessed the donkey, put him to bed in a shed, collected her
belongings, and limped out of the yard, leaning a little on the
ivory-topped stick she carried. She had had a diseased hip-joint as a
child, which had left her right leg slightly contracted.
She came round into a garden. It smelt of wallflowers and the other
things which flower at the end of April; and, underneath all these, of
pines. The pine-woods came close up to the garden's edge, crowding and
humming like bees. Pine-needles strewed the lawn. The tennis-lawn, it
was most summers; but this summer one didn't play tennis, one was too
busy. So the lawn was set with croquet hoops, a wretched game, but one
which wounded soldiers can play. Dorothy used to bring them over from
the hospital to spend the afternoon.
An oblong of light lay across the lawn. It came from the drawing-room
window, which ought, of course, to have been blinded against hostile
aircraft. Alix, standing in the garden, saw inside. She saw Dorothy,
just in from the hospital, still in her V.A.D. dress. The light shone on
her fair wavy hair and fair pretty face. Not even a stiff linen collar
could make Dorothy plain. Margot was there too, in the khaki uniform of
the Women's Volunteer Reserve; she had just come in from drilling. She
usually worked at the Woolwich canteen in the evenings, but had this
evening off, because of John. She was making sand-bags. Their mother,
Alix's aunt Eleanor, was pinning tickets on clothes for Belgians. She
was tall and handsome, and like Alix's mother, only so different, and
she was secretary of the local Belgian Committee (as of many other
committees, local and otherwise). She often wore a little worried frown,
and was growing rather thin, on account of the habits of this
unfortunate and scattered people. One of them had been their guest since
November; she was in the drawing-room now, a plump, dark-eyed girl,
knitting placidly and with the immense rapidity noticeable on the
Continent, and not to be emulated by islanders without exhaustion.
Alix's uncle Gerald (a special constable, which was why he need not
bother about his blinds much) stood by the small fire (they were
wholesome people, and not frowsty) with an evening paper, but he was not
reading it, he was talking to John.
For among them, the centre of the family, was John; John wounded and
just out of hospital and home on a month's sick-leave; John with a red
scar from his square jaw to his square forehead, stammering as he talked
because the nerves of his tongue had been damaged. Alix, watching from
the garden, saw the queer way his throat worked, struggling with some
word.
They were asking John questions, of course. Sensible questions, too;
they were sensible people. They knew that the conduct of this campaign
was not in John's hands, and that he did not know so much more about it
than they did.
The room, with its group of busy, attractive, efficient people, seemed
to the watcher in the dark piny garden full of intelligence and war and
softly shaded electric light. Alix narrowed her eyes against it and
thought it would be paintable.
3
The dark round eyes of the Belgian girl, looking out through the window,
met hers. She laughed and waved her knitting. She took Alix always as a
huge joke. Alix had from the first taken care that she should, since the
moment when Mademoiselle Verstigel had arrived, fluent with tales from
Antwerp. It is a safe axiom that those who play the clown do not get
confidences.
The others looked out at her too when Mademoiselle Verstigel waved. They
called out 'Hullo, Alix! How late you are. John's been here two hours.
Come along.'
Alix limped up the steps and in at the French window, where she stood
and blinked, the light on her pale, pointed face and narrowed eyes. John
rose to meet her, and she gave him her hand and her crooked smile.
'You're all right now, aren't you?' she said, and John, an accurate
person, said, 'Very nearly,' while his mother returned, 'I'm afraid he's
a long way from all right yet.'
'Isn't it funny, it makes him stammer,' said Dorothy, who was
professionally interested in wounds. 'But he's getting quite nice and
fat again.'
'N-not so fat as I was when I got hit,' said John. 'The trenches are the
best flesh-producing ground known; high living and plain thinking and no
exercise. The only people who are getting thin out there are the
stretcher-bearers, who have to carry burdens, the Commander-in-chief,
who has to think, the newspaper men, who have to write when there's
nothing to say, and the chaplains, who have to chaplain. I met old
Lennard of Cats, walking about Armentieres in February, and I thought he
was the Bishop of Zanzibar, he'd gone so lean. When last I'd seen him he
was rolling down King's Parade arm-in-arm with Chesterton, and I
couldn't get by. It was an awfully sad change.... By the way, _you_ all
look thinner.'
'Well, we're not in the trenches,' said Margot. 'We're leading busy and
useful lives, full of war activities. Besides, our food costs us more.
But Dorothy and I are fairly hefty still. It's mother who's dwining; and
Alix, though she's such a lazy little beggar. Alix is hopeless; she does
nothing but draw and paint. She could earn something on the stage as the
Special Star Turn, the Girl who isn't doing her bit. She doesn't so much
as knit a body-belt or draw the window-curtains against Zepps.'
Alix looked round from the window to stick out the tip of her tongue at
Margot.
'Mais elle est boiteuse, la pauvre petite,' put in the Belgian girl,
with the literalness that makes this people a little _difficile_ in home
life. 'What can she do?'
Alix giggled in her corner. Margot said, 'All right, Mademoiselle, we
were only ragging. There's the post.' She went out to fetch it. Margot
was a good girl, but, like so many others, tired of Belgians, though
this Belgian was a nice one, as strangers in a foreign land go. Alix
hated and feared her whole nation; they had been through altogether too
much.
Margot came back with the letters.
'Betty and Terry,' she said, with satisfaction. 'Betty's is for me and
Terry's for you, mother.' (Terry was in France, Betty driving an
ambulance car in Flanders.) 'Two for you, Alix.'
Alix took hers, which were both marked 'On Active Service,' and put them
in her pocket. Simultaneously her aunt Eleanor began to read Terry's
aloud (it was about flies, and bread and jam, and birds, and some music
he had made and was sending home to be kept safe) and Margot began to
read extracts from Betty's (about nails, and bad roads, and different
kinds of shells, and people) and Uncle Gerald read bits out of the paper
(about Hill 60, and Hartmannsweilerkopf, and Sedd el Bahr, and the _Leon
Gambetta_, and liquor, and Mr. Lloyd George).
4
Alix slipped out at the window and limped round to the side door and
into the house and upstairs to the schoolroom, which she was allowed to
use as a studio. It was littered with things of hers: easels, chalks,
paints, piles of finished and unfinished drawings and paintings. Some
hung on the walls: some of hers and some by the writer of the letter she
took out to read. He painted better than she did, but drew worse--or
had, in the long-ago days when persons of his age and sex were drawing
and painting at all.
Alix read the letter. It was headed obscurely with an R, some little
figures of men, and two weeping eyes, which was where the writer was for
the moment stationed. Every now and then a phrase or sentence was
erased. The writer, apparently a man of honour, had censored it himself.
His honour had not carried him so quixotically far as to erase the
hieroglyphics at the head of the paper.
It said:--
'DEAR ALIX,--Since I last wrote we've been moved some miles; I
mustn't, of course, indicate where to. It is nice country--less
flat than the other place, and jolly distant ridges,
transparent blue and lavender coloured. I'll do a sketch when
we get into billets at the end of the week. My company is in
the trenches now; commodious trenches they are, the best in the
line, but rather too near the people opposite for
comfort--they're such noisy lunatics. It's eight o'clock now,
and they've begun their evening hate; they do a bit every
evening. The only creature they've strafed to-night yet is a
brown rat, whom we none of us grudge them. It's interesting the
different noises the shells make coming; you can nearly always
tell what kind they are. If I was musical I'd make a symphony
out of them. I should think your cousin Terry Orme could. Some
of them scream, thin and peevishly, like a baby fretting; some
howl like a hyena, some mew like a kitten. Then there's Lloyd
George's Special, which says "Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd," and
then all the men shout "_George_."' (A page of further
discursion on shells, too technical for reproduction here.
Then, resumed next morning,) 'I'm fairly sleepy this morning;
we had to stand to from two to six A.M., expecting an attack
which never came off. I wish it had, it would have been a way
to get warm. We've had poor luck to-night; the Tommy who was
sent over the top to look at the wire was made into a French
landlord, and our sergeant-major stopped one with his head,
silly ass, he was simply asking for it. It's my belief he was
trying to get back to Blighty, but I hope they won't send him
further than the base. You would like to see the dawn coming
over this queer country, grey and cold and misty. I watched it
through my peri for an hour. The Boches lay perdu in their
trenches mostly, but sometimes you'd see one looming over his
parapet through the mist. I want some tea now more than most
things. You might write soon. You never answered my last, so
it's generous of me to be writing again. How's every one at the
School, and how's life and work? Your enemies the Ruski seem to
be in a tight place, don't they?--Yours,
'BASIL DOYE.'
Alix read this letter rather quickly. It bored her. It concerned the
things she least preferred to hear about. That was, of course, the worst
of letters from the front. Life at Wood End, as at other homes, was full
of letters from the front. They seemed to Alix like bullets and bits of
shrapnel crashing into her world, with their various tunes. She might,
from her nervous frown, have been afraid of 'stopping one.' She twisted
up the letter into a hard ball with her thin, double-jointed fingers, as
she stared, frowning, at a painting on the wall. The painting was of a
grey-green pond, floored with a thin, weedy scum. A hole-riddled,
battered old tin rode in the middle of it; reeds stood very quietly
round; a broken boot was half sunk in the mud among them. Over it all
brooded and slept a heavy June noon. It was well painted; Alix thought
it the best thing Basil Doye had ever done. They had spent an afternoon
by the pond in June 1914; Alix remembered it vividly--the sleepy,
brooding silence, the heavy fragrance of the hawthorn, the scum-green
pond, the tin and the boot, the suggestion of haunting that they had
talked of at the time and that Basil had got rather successfully into
his picture afterwards. Those were curious days, those old days before
August 1914; or rather it was the days ever since that were curious and
like a nightmare. Before that life was of a reality, a sanity, an
enduringness, a beauty. It still was, only it was choked and confused by
the unspeakable things that every one thought mattered so much, but
which were really evil dreams, to be thrown off impatiently. Underneath
them all the time the real things, the enduring things--green ponds,
music, moonlight, loveliness--ran like a choked stream....
Alix read her other letter, which was from her young brother Paul, and
also written in a trench. The chief thing she thought about this was
that Paul's handwriting was even worse than usual. He wrote in pencil on
a very small piece of paper, and scrawled up and down wildly. He might
have been twelve instead of eighteen and a half. Paul was rather a
brilliant boy. When the war broke out he had been a distinguished head
of his school, and had just obtained a particularly satisfactory Oxford
scholarship. His letters, since he went to the front in March, had been
increasingly poor in quality and quantity. It made Alix angry that he
should be out there. She thought it no place for children, and, as
Paul's elder by nearly seven years, she knew all about his nerves.
CHAPTER II
JOHN TALKS
1
'Alix, you'll be late for dinner,' Dorothy's voice called across the
landing. Alix went to the big bedroom she shared with Dorothy and
Margot. Margot was hooking up her frock; Dorothy was washing with vigour
and as much completeness as her basin would allow, and complaining that
John was occupying the bathroom.
'I hate not having a bath after hospital. But one can't grudge it to the
dear lamb. How do _you_ think he looks, Alix? Rather nervy, he is still.
That's the worst of a head wound. You know Mahoney, Margot, that Munster
Fusiliers man with a bit of shrapnel in his forehead? The other men in
ward 5 say he still keeps jumping out of bed in his sleep and standing
to. The only way they can get him back is to say 'Jack Johnson
overhead,' and then he scuttles into bed and puts his head under the
pillow; only sometimes he scuttles under the bed instead, and then the
only way they can get him out is to say 'Minnie's coming,' and he nips
out quick for fear of being buried alive. I believe he frightened one of
the young ladies he walks out with into fits one day by thinking he saw
snipers in the trees. Of course one never knows how much of it he's
putting on for a joke, he's so silly, but he is badly wrecked too.'
Margot said, 'Isn't Mahoney having massage now? Nan Goddard said she
thought she was going to have him to do. She has four every morning now.
She likes Mahoney; she thinks he looks such an innocent little dear.'
Dorothy said, 'Innocent, did she? Mahoney! Oh well, she'll get to know
him better if she has him for massage. Did you hear Mahoney and
Macpherson's latest exploit?' This need not be here retailed. It is well
known that a convalescent hospital containing forty soldiers is not
without its episodes, and provides many fruitful topics of conversation.
They dressed meanwhile. Dorothy, in white muslin, was fair-skinned and
fresh, with shining light brown hair and honest grey eyes. Margot, in
yellow tussore, had hair a shade darker and curlier, and her eyes were
hazel. They were both very nice to look at, and had pleasant, clear,
loud voices, with which they talked about soldiers. Alix put on an old
green shantung frock and a string of amber beads; she looked thin,
childish, elf-like; her eyes were rather narrowed under brooding brows.
2
They were at dinner. Alix sat opposite John, who wore a dinner jacket
again, as if there were no war. He looked brown and square and cheerful.
Between the daffodils Alix saw his eyes, nervous and watchful, with the
look in them that was in so many young men's eyes in these days. Next
him was Mademoiselle Verstigel, stolid, placid, eating largely, saying
little.
Mr. Orme spoke of the big advance that they all believed was coming
directly.
'Not yet,' said John. 'N-not enough shells.'
'Wish I could go and help make some,' said Margot.
They all discussed the munitions question. John had strong views on it,
differing in some particulars from his father's. John related the inner
history of several recent episodes of war, to support his view. He was
very interesting. John was not naturally an anecdotal person, but his
mind had been of late stored and fed with experiences. Some officers are
reduced by trench life to an extreme reticence; the conversational
faculty of others is stimulated. Nervous strain works in both of these
ways, often in the same person. Anyhow John had to talk about the war
to-night, because at Wood End they all did. He answered his father's
questions about barbed wire, his mother's about dug-outs, his sisters'
about things to eat. They asked him all the things they hadn't liked to
ask him while he was in hospital for fear of setting his brain working
and retarding his recovery. Dorothy wanted to know if it was true what
the men said, that their bully beef often climbed out of its tin and
walked down the trench. John said it was not, and that it was one of the
erroneous statements he had most frequently to censor in the men's
letters. Margot wanted to know what sort of meals he had in the
trenches. John said mess in the dug-out usually consisted of six courses
(preceded by vermuth), three drinks, and coffee. He proceeded to
describe the courses in detail.
His mother wanted to know about the nights, whether he got any sleep.
John said yes, quite a lot, when it didn't happen to be his watch. What
about the noise? his mother asked. Had he got at all used to it yet?
John said it wasn't nearly so noisy as the Royal Free Hospital, where he
had spent the last month. His father asked what he thought of the German
soldiers as clean fighters. John said they seemed much like anybody
else, as far as he'd noticed. Mademoiselle Verstigel, understanding
this, shook her head in protest. His mother asked, did he think it was
true that our Tommies were learning to pray, or was the contrary
statement truer, that they were losing such faith as they had? John said
he had not himself noticed either of these phenomena in his platoon, but
he might, of course, ask them. His father, who was interested, both as a
person of intelligence and as a man of business, in the Balkans, got
there, and they discussed the exhausting and exhaustive topic of those
wild and erratic states, the relations of each to other, to the Central
Powers, to the Allies, and to the war, at some length. It was the period
when people were saying that Greece would come in for us, that Rumania
might, and that it was essential to collar Bulgaria. So they said these
things duly.
3
In a pause John said to Alix across the table, 'What's Aunt Daphne doing
now?'
There was a slight sense of jar. Margot, who was sympathetic, was
ashamed for Alix, because of what her mother, Daphne Sandomir, was
doing. For this always unusual lady, instead of being engaged in working
for the Red Cross, Belgian refugees, or soldiers' and sailors' families,
was attending a peace conference in New York. She had gone there from
France, which she had been helping the Friends to reconstruct. She was
not a Friend herself, not holding with institutional religion, but she
admired their ready obedience to the constructive impulse. She was
called by some a Pacificist, by more a Pacifist, by others a Pro-German,
by most a member of the Union of Democratic Control, which she was not,
for reasons which she was ready to explain, but which need not be here
detailed.
Alix told John, in her clear, indifferent, rather melancholy little
voice, about the peace conference. In common with many children of two
intensely enthusiastic parents (her father had been a Polish
liberationist, who had died in a Russian prison) she had a certain
half-cynical detachment from and indifference to ardours and causes. Her
mother was always up to some stirring enterprise, always pursuing some
vividly seen star. She had been at Newnham in the days when girls went
to college ardently, full of aims and ideals and self-realisations and
great purposes (instead of as now, because it seems the natural thing to
do after school for those with any leanings towards learning) and she
had lived her life at the same high pitch ever since. Alix found her
admirable, but discomposing. She found Alix engaging, even intriguing,
but narrow-hearted, selfish and indolent; she accused her of shrinking
from the world's griefs in a way unworthy of her revolutionary father,
whom she closely resembled in face and brain.
John was rather interested in the peace conference. He had read
something about it the other day in one of the periodicals which
flourished in the University to which he belonged, and which wholly
approved of the enterprise. Not that John, for his part, wholly approved
of the periodical; he found it a trifle unbalanced, heady, partisan.
John was a very fair-minded and level-headed young man, of conservative
traditions. But independent, too. When the temporary second lieutenant
with both legs blown off, who had occupied the next bed to his in the
Royal Free, had said, perusing the comments on the peace conference in
the periodical in question (under the heading 'A Triumph of Pacifism'),
'What sickening piffle, isn't it?' John had said, after a little
cogitation, 'Well, I don't know. They _mean_ well.' The legless
lieutenant (Trinity Hall) had snorted, 'They mean well to the Boche....
After all our _trouble_ ... all the legs we've lost ... to cave in
now.... Besides, what do _they_ think they can do? A lot of people
gassing.... I wonder who they _are_?'
John had said he believed one of his aunts was keen on it.
'Sort of thing aunts _would_ be keen on,' the other youth had vaguely,
and, indeed, quite inaccurately commented.
On the whole John didn't much hold by such movements, but he took a more
lenient view of them than the rest of his family did.
His father said, 'A little premature, discussing peace terms before we
know we're going to be in a position to dictate them.'
His mother murmured, 'Peace, peace, where there is no peace,' and smiled
kindly at Alix to comfort her for her mother.
Dorothy said, answering her father, 'Well, _of course_ we know we are.
But I don't see any use in discussing things beforehand, anyhow: we
shall be able to think when the time comes.'
Mademoiselle looked with her round black eyes from one to another, like
a robin. She might have been reflecting in her mind that Dorothy was
very English, Mr. Orme very depressing, Mrs. Orme very kind, John very
impartial, and Alix very indifferent. What she said, turning to John,
was (and she would seem to have been preparing the remark for some time:
she was very keen on improving her English), 'The war is trulee
devileesh, yes? The Boches are not as humans, no? More, is it not,
Monsieur, as the devils from below?'
John grinned. Dorothy said, 'True for you, Mademoiselle.' Margot said,
'You're really coming on. Only you must say "like," not "as." "As" only
comes in books; it's too elegant. And devilish isn't elegant enough.'
'El-ee-gant,' Mademoiselle repeated the word softly. She was perhaps
wondering whether it was necessary to be elegant at all in one's
references to the Boches.
4
After dinner they got out a map of the western front and spread it on a
table and made John say, so far as he knew, in which parts of the line
the various battalions at the moment were, and Dorothy wrote their
names, very small, all down the line. Alix slipped away while they were
doing this, to smell the garden. Soon they began to sing in the
drawing-room. Margot sang, 'When we wind up the watch on the Rhine,' a
song popular among soldiers just then. She was no doubt practising for
canteen concerts. John joined in the chorus, in a baritone voice
somewhat marred by trench life.
Alix went indoors and up to bed. She was shivering, as if she was cold,
or very tired, or frightened....
She undressed hastily, whistling shrilly, and got into bed and pulled
the bedclothes up round her neck and read Mr. Give Bell's last book,
with much of which she differed violently, so violently that she made
marginal and unsympathetic notes on it in pencil as she lay.
'I'll send it to Basil and see what he thinks,' she thought.
Then Dorothy and Margot came up, merry and talking.
'You _are_ a lazy little unsociable slacker,' Margot told her. 'John was
telling us such ripping stories, too. Make him tell you to-morrow about
the sergeant-major and the pheasant and the barbed wire. It was awfully
funny.'
Dorothy yawned. 'Oh, I'm sleepy. Thank goodness it's Sunday to-morrow,
so we can lie in. Margot, you've pinched my slippers.... Oh no, all
right.'
Alix lay and read. Her cousins undressed and said their prayers and got
into bed.
'Ready, Alix?' asked Margot, her finger on the switch.
'Right,' said Alix, putting Mr. Clive Bell under her pillow, where,
deeply as she differed from him, he seemed to lie as a protection
against something.
The switch clicked, and the room was in darkness.
Margot and Dorothy murmured on drowsily, dropping remarks about the
hospital, the canteen, things John had said.... The remarks trailed away
into sleep.
5
Alix lay awake. Her forehead was hot and her feet were cold. She was
tense, and on the brink of shivering. Staring into the dark she saw
things happening across the seas: dreadful things, ugly, jarring,
horrifying things. War--war--war. It pressed round her; there was no
escape from it. Every one talked it, breathed it, lived in it. Aunt
Eleanor, with her committees, and her terrible refugees; Mademoiselle
Verstigel, with her round robin's eyes that had looked horror in the
face so near; Uncle Gerald, with his paper and his intelligent city
rumours; Dorothy and Margot with their soldiers, who kept coming to tea,
cheerful, charming, and maimed; John, damaged and stammering, with his
nervous eyes and his quiet, humorous trench talk; Basil, writing from
his dug-out of Boche and shells ... little Paul out there in the
dark ... they were all up against the monster, being strangled ... it
was like that beastly Laocoon....
There was a balcony running along outside the bedrooms at the front of
the house. The moonlight lay palely on it; Alix watched it through the
long open window. Through the window came a sound of quiet crying;
gasping, choked sobbing, as if a child were in despair. Alix sat up in
bed and listened. Margot and Dorothy breathed softly, each a
peace-drugged column of bedclothes.
Alix, pale and frowning, scrambled out of bed, shuddered, and pattered
on thin, naked feet to the window and out on to the moon-bathed stone
balcony floor.
Outside his own window, John, barefooted, in pink pyjamas, stood,
gripping with both hands on to the iron balustrade, his face turned up
to the moon, crying, sobbing, moaning, like a little child, like a man
on the rack. He was saying things from time to time ... muttering
them ... Alix heard. Things quite different from the things he had said
at dinner. Only his eyes, as Alix had met them between the daffodils,
had spoken at all like this; and even that had not been like this. His
eyes were now wide and wet, and full of a horror beyond speech. They
turned towards Alix and looked through her, beyond her, unseeing. John
was fast asleep.
Alix, to hear no more, put her hands over her ears and turned and ran
into the bedroom. She flung herself upon Dorothy and shook her by the
shoulders, shook her till she sat up startled and awake.
Alix stammered, 'John--John. He's walking in his sleep ... out there....
He's crying--he's talking ... go and stop him.'
Dorothy, efficient and professional in a moment, sprang out of bed into
her two waiting slippers, and ran into the balcony. Alix heard her,
gentle, quiet, firm, soothing John, leading him back to bed.
Alix was most suddenly and violently sick.
When Dorothy came back, twenty minutes later, she was huddled under the
bedclothes, exhausted, shuddering and cold.
'He's quiet now,' said Dorothy, taking off her slippers. 'Poor old boy.
They often do it, you know. It's the nervous shock. I must listen at
nights.... I say, don't tell him, Alix; he wouldn't like it. Specially
to know he was crying. Poor old Johnny. Just the thing he'd never do,
awake, however far gone he was. Nor talking like that; he was saying
awful things.... Did you hear?'
'Yes,' said Alix, in a small, faint voice.
Dorothy looked at her curiously, and saw her grey pallor and shut eyes.
'Why, you're ill too: I believe Johnny's upset you.' She spoke with a
kindly pity and contempt. 'Is that it, kiddie?'
'Don't know,' said Alix. 'No. Should think it was too many walnuts at
dinner. Let's go to sleep now.'
Dorothy, before she did this, turned her head on the pillow towards
Alix's corner and said kindly, 'You'll never be any use if you don't
forget _yourself_, Alix. You couldn't possibly nurse if you were always
giving in to your own nerves. After all, what they can bear to go
through, we ought to be able to bear to hear about. But of course you're
not used to it, I know. You should come to the hospital sometimes.
Good-night. If you feel rotten in the morning, don't get up.'
Dorothy went to sleep.
Alix lay and watched the shadows shifting slowly round on the balcony,
and listened for sobbing, but heard only the quiet murmur of the pines.
'What they can bear to go through.... But they can't, they can't, they
can't ... we can bear to hear about ... but we can't, we can't, we
can't....'
It was like the intolerable ticking of a clock, and beat itself away at
last into a sick dream.
On the other side of the wall, John started and sat bolt upright in bed,
with wide staring eyes.... John, like many thousand others, would
perhaps never sleep quietly through a night again. Yet John had been a
composed sleeper once.
CHAPTER III
ALIX GOES
1
It was Sunday next day. Dorothy and Margot conducted a party of wounded
soldiers to matins. Mrs. Orme, who thought it time Mademoiselle
Verstigel went to Mass again, sent her over to Wonford, where there was
a church of her persuasion. She herself had to go up to town to the
Sunday club where soldiers' and sailors' families were kept out of the
streets and given coffee, news, friendship, music, and the chance to
read good books, a chance of which Mrs. Orme, a sanguine person, hoped
undiscouraged that they would one day avail themselves. (Hope, faith,
and love were in her family. Her sister, Daphne Sandomir, when in
England, held study circles of working women to instruct them in the
principles which make for permanent peace, and hoped with the same
fervour that they would read the books and pamphlets she gave them.)
Mr. Orme and John walked over to the links to play golf. Alix, not
having either the church, club, or golf habit, and being unfitted for
much walking, sat in the wood, tried to paint, and failed. She felt
peevish, tired, cross and selfish, and her head ached, as one's head
nearly always does after being sick in the night. The pines were no
good: stupid trees, the wrong shape. What sort of pictures would
one be painting out there? Mud-coloured levels, mud-coloured men,
splashes of green here and there ... and red.... And blue sky, or
mud-coloured, with shells winging through it like birds, singing,
'Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd.'... The sort of picture Basil would be
painting and the way he would be painting it she knew exactly. Only
probably he wasn't painting at all to-day. It was Sunday-hate day.
Whizz-bangs, pom-poms, trench-mortars spinning along and bouncing off
the wire trench roof.... Minnie coming along to blow the whole trench
inside out ... legs and arms and bits of men flying in the air ... the
rest of them buried deep in choking earth ... perhaps to be dug out
alive, perhaps dead.... What was it John had said on the
balcony--something about a leg ... the leg of a friend ... pulling it
out of the chaos of earth and mud and stones which had been a trench ...
thinking it led on to the entire friend, finding it didn't, was a
detached bit.... Had John cried at the time? Been sick? Probably not;
John was a self-contained young man. He had waited till afterwards, when
he was asleep.
Alix, seeing her friends in scattered bits, seeing worse than that,
seeing what John had seen and mentioned with tears, turned the greenish
pallor of pale, ageing cheese, and dropped her head in her hands.
Painting was off for that morning. Painting and war don't go together.
2
Mrs. Orme came home in the afternoon, tired but still energetic. Mr.
Orme and John came in to tea too, with Sunday papers and having seen
telegrams about the German offensive being stopped at Ypres. Callers
dropped in to tea. They worried John by their questions. They kindly
drew out Mademoiselle Verstigel, in French worse than her English.
Directly after tea Margot had to hurry away up to town to the canteen.
The callers dropped out again, one by one. John and his father went out
to smoke in the garden, and to look at young trees. Dorothy went to make
a cake for the hospital.
Mrs. Orme sorted, filed, and pigeon-holed case-papers about Belgians.
Alix, sitting in the window seat, said, 'Aunt Eleanor, I think I'm too
far away from the School. I think I'd better go and stay in London, to
be nearer.'
Mrs. Orme abstracted part of her attention from the Belgians, paused,
paper in hand, and looked at her niece with her fine dark kind eyes,
that were like her sister's, only different.
'Very well, child. You may be right. I'm sorry, though....' She jabbed a
paper on the file, and gave more of her attention still. 'Go and stay in
London.... But with whom, dear? And what does your mother think?'
'Oh, mother,' said Alix, and gave her small, crooked smile. 'Mother
won't mind. She never does. I'll write to her about it, any time....
Well, I might be in rooms--alone or with some one else.'
'Not alone,' Mrs. Orme said promptly. 'You're not old enough.
Twenty-five, is it? You look less. Oh yes, I know girls do it, but I
don't like it. I wouldn't let Dorothy or Margot. Who could you share
them with? You've not thought of any one especial? It would have to be
some one sensible, who'd look after you, or you'd get ill.... Nicholas
lives with another man, doesn't he?... Wait: I've just thought of
something....' She began rummaging in her desk. 'I've a letter
somewhere; I kept it, I know. She looked for it. Alix thought how like
she was, as she searched, to her sister Daphne; both were so often
looking for papers which they knew they had kept; and both had the same
short-sighted frown and graceful bend of the neck.
'Here,' said Mrs. Orme, and held up an envelope addressed in a flowing
hand--the sort of hand once used by most ladies, but now chiefly by
elderly and middle-aged persons of an unliterary habit.
'Emily Frampton,' said Mrs. Orme. 'No, you wouldn't know her, but she's
a cousin. That is, not a cousin, but married to one. She's the widow of
your cousin Laurence, who died fifteen years ago. None of us could think
why ... well.' She checked herself. 'She's very nice and kind, Emily
Frampton.' But so different, she meant, from their cousin Laurence. This
was so. Laurence Frampton had been scholarly, humorous, keen-witted,
dry-tongued, and a professor of Greek. Emily Frampton was not; which is
sufficient description of her for the moment.
'She and her two girls (her own, you know; she was a widow even before
she married Laurence) live at Clapton. Violette, Spring Hill, Upper
Clapton, N. They're poor; they want some nice person to board with them.
She's very kind; you'd be taken care of.' Mrs. Orme puckered her wide,
white forehead and looked at Alix as if she were a Belgian with a
case-paper. 'Really, till your mother comes back and takes the
responsibility, I can't let you go just anywhere.'
'Well--' Alix drawled a little, uncertainly. 'I don't _like_ being taken
care of, Aunt Eleanor. And they sound dull.'
'Well, dear, you must settle. I own I couldn't personally live
at--what's the name of the house--Geranium--Pansy--no, Violet--Violette,
I mean. Those sort of people are so dreadfully out of the currents;
probably know nothing about the war, except that there is one, and....'
'Well,' said Alix, more quickly, 'perhaps I'll go there, Aunt Eleanor. I
think I will.'
'You'll be doing them a kindness,' said Mrs. Orme. 'And of course it
will be much more convenient for you than going up to town from here
every day. If you like I'll write to Mrs. Frampton to-day. We shall miss
you, dear.' She screwed up her eyes affectionately at Alix, and added,
'You don't look well, child. I wish your mother would come home. You
miss her.'
'It's fun when mother's home,' said Alix. 'But it's quieter when she
isn't. Mother's so--so stimulating.'
'Oh, very,' said Mrs. Orme, who thought of Mrs. Sandomir as a spoilt,
clever, fascinating but wrong-headed younger sister. She couldn't tell
Alix how wrong-headed she found her mother, but she added kindly, 'You
know, my dear, that I think she is mistaken in her present enterprise,
and would be much better at home.'
'Most enterprises are mistaken. All, very likely,' said Alix, and her
aunt was shocked, thinking she should not be cynical so young.
'The child's a funny outcome of Paul Sandomir and Daphne,' she
reflected, and returned to her case-papers.
3
John came in. Alix noticed how cheerful and placid he looked, and how
his hand, holding his pipe, shook. He sat down and began to talk about
the advantages of not digging up one of the lawns for potatoes, which
Margot wanted to do. His memories lay behind his watchful eyes, safely
guarded. But Alix knew.
'I must write to mother,' she said, and left the room.
As she went upstairs she met Mademoiselle Verstigel coming down. Her
Sunday dress was bright scarlet, with canary-coloured ribbons. She had
saved it out of the wreck at home, when all seemed lost, and fled in it,
like so many Belgians. She looked at Alix with her round eyes, and they
too held memories. Alix stumbled at a stair. Mademoiselle caught her
thin arm in her own plump one and saved her from falling. Alix hated the
touch; she said, 'Oh, merci,' and gripped her stick tight and hurried on
upstairs with her uneven, limping steps. She got into the schoolroom and
shut the door.
'I must get away,' she said, breathing hard. 'I will go to Violette.'
PART II
VIOLETTE